


A Thousand Words' Worth

by blackidyll



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015)
Genre: Flirting, M/M, Postcards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2015-12-06
Packaged: 2018-05-05 05:59:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5364044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackidyll/pseuds/blackidyll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I'll send you a postcard." </p><p>"Please don't." </p><p> </p><p>Because Bond is infuriating, he sends them along anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Thousand Words' Worth

**Author's Note:**

> My favourite things from _Spectre_ are all the little details and small moments of interaction between the characters. Everyone loves the cats. I'm obsessed with the postcards. 
> 
> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://blackidyll.tumblr.com/post/134577174855/thingswhatareawesome-good-griefthis-is-the) for [thingswhatareawesome](http://thingswhatareawesome.tumblr.com) (thanks for reading my fangirling in the tags :D *rolls up in a shippy burrito with you*)

**Vatican City**

The first postcard is of St. Peter’s Square – Piazza San Pietro, the postcard cheerfully tells him – and Q quite nearly tears it up at first glance. He knows exactly where his three million pound prototype car is currently residing, thank you very much, and no amount of champagne will make up for the way his blood simultaneously runs hot and cold at the thought of the DB10 sunk deep in the Tiber River, the thousands of hours of innovation and workmanship he and Q Branch’s finest engineering team had put into the automobile spent in one short evening.

Q glares spitefully at the vista of St. Peter’s Square, beautifully lit in the night, and hopes 007 has said his prayers before returning to headquarters; he’s going to put the fear of Q Branch in 007.

 

**Florence, Italy**

Q doesn’t expect the second postcard at all – it’s months later, just long enough for MI6 to settle back into a cautious rhythm, for Q’s underlings to feel secure enough in their location’s permanence that they’ve started storing some personal effects back at work. Q nearly transfers the postcard onto Corrine’s desk – she collects paintings, and the postcard is in the style of a watercolour, depicting (as the caption at the bottom of the postcard proclaims) the Firenze il Duomo.

Or the Florence Cathedral, Q finds out a quick internet search later. Firenze is Florence in Italian – who knew? Not Q, who knows numerous programming languages fluently together with a fair bit of obscure Latin, and absolutely no other useful live language other than English.

There’s a calico tabby drawn into the picture, curled sweetly atop of a wall overlooking the Firenze il Duomo. Q tells himself it’s the only reason why he keeps the postcard.

(It doesn’t explain why it joins the now bent-edged and much scribbled over postcard of the Vatican City in Q’s bottommost desk drawer).

 

**Las Vegas, United States**

Q receives a postcard of Las Vegas’s famous fountains next, and sighs so heavily that the Communications team doesn't stop plying him with tea and brownies the rest of the morning. His exasperation is twofold: one, Q doesn’t remember any mention of casinos or gambling in the Double-O’s mission parameters, which means that the mission has run thoroughly off-course, or that 007 is off recklessly gambling his life and maybe some of Q’s equipment away for the fun of it. Q doesn’t like either implication.

Two, Q desperately wants to call up the man and ask him if he understands what “classified” means. And he can’t, because Q is professional and won’t compromise his agent’s cover like that.

The other side of the postcard, like the first two, is devoid of anything but Q’s mailstop and the address for MI6’s current headquarters. Q wonders which branch is responsible for sorting mail – Security? HR? Perhaps even Q Branch’s Identification team?

Postcards must be safe, Q thinks. At least they can’t contain anthrax spores.

 

**Cing Jing, Taiwan**

Q stares at the photograph of the sheep, and thinks,  _why_? The written side of the postcard is only slightly more interesting, if only because Bond’s decided to write out, in point form, the process for shearing sheep.

Q assumes Cing Jing must be so rural and calm that it’s driven Bond half out of his mind, and sips peaceably at his cup of tea.

 

**Istanbul, Turkey**

Turkey is apparently Türkiye in Turkish. Q finds the postcard, unmailed, atop a small box of Turkish delights at his workstation, and wonders what happened during the mission – Bond had time to buy and fill out the address on the postcard but not to send it, and yet kept it safe enough to bring it back to London with him.

The Turkish delights are a tat too sweet for Q’s taste, but he finds he likes the chewy crunch of the pistachios.

 

**St. Wolfgang, Austria**

_Merry Christmas_ , says the next postcard. Q touches the written side of the postcard, pins it to his corkboard that way instead of the picture-side up. The fairy-lit wintry images of St. Wolfgang are too artificially staged; Q prefers the imperfect humanity of Bond’s handwriting, near illegible this time – because of the cold? Was he in a rush?

The next day is New Year’s Eve, and Q texts  _Happy New Year_  to an unlisted phone number. He hopes Bond hasn’t destroyed that phone yet.

 

**Christmas Island, Australia**

This postcard arrives at Q’s flat.

Q wastes half the morning trying to figure out how the hell Bond got his address, and wastes the rest thinking of creative threats to level at the man when he returns.

Then he sits down and considers the postcard, because if Q’s memory serves him correctly – Bond isn’t on a mission at the moment.

Bond has included a list of utterly random Australian facts this time, and so Q learns that “bo-peep” in rhyming slang means  _sleep_ , and that Australians hold the world record for the largest Christmas cracker. The stamp on the postcard is oddly whimsical; because the postcard is from Christmas Island, the cartoon lobster depicted on the stamp wears a little Santa hat and clutches a present in its claws. Q tries to imagine Bond picking out the stamp and makes himself laugh instead.

Q will likely never visit Australia, but it isn’t so bad, living vicariously through someone else like this.

 

**St. Petersburg, Russia**

“Your handwriting is atrocious,” Q says, and he is glad his voice comes out steady because his hands on the postcard are anything but. “Your handwriting is atrocious and I don’t understand how it’s managed to find its way here – I can’t understand a damned thing you’ve written.”

The printed text on the postcard is in Cyrillic script; Bond’s message is in Latin script, but it’s coded. They’d extracted Bond four days before but the postcard only arrived today, and Q’s mind can’t seem to make the connection between Bond’s unconscious body and the cramped writing filling the postcard – Bond wrote the card, didn’t he? Surely he can wake up to decode it for Q, because Q can’t understand anything on it other than the address.

Bond had sent the postcard to his flat.

The postcard is evidence and Q leaves it safely at Q Branch when he returns home that night. For the first time since he’s transferred them into a cardboard box for safekeeping, Q unearths each and every postcard that Bond has ever sent him from all corners of the world, and stares and stares at them until he can breathe again.

 

**Tokyo, Japan**

Q doesn’t receive any postcards for a long while. It’s happened before; some missions are just too frantic and violent for such indulgences, and occasionally the work takes Bond to locations so remote that postcards and post offices are non-existent.

The postcard from Japan, as if in recompense, is quite beautiful, and Q smiles at the reproduction  _ukiyoe_  painting before turning it over to look at the message. His address is there, in Bond’s usual handwriting, but in the message area is an entire paragraph in Japanese characters.

Q knows intellectually that Bond is multilingual, but it’s one thing to hear him fluently speaking French or German without an accent and another thing altogether to see him writing in an entirely unrelated language, his penmanship neat and precise with the complicated characters.

He could scan the postcard, run a Japanese-to-English translation on the image, but it’s all right. A little mystery makes for a good distraction; one day, Q will make Bond read the message out loud for him, and tell Q the meaning of the words then.

 

**London, United Kingdom**

The postcard is from the National Gallery and depicts  _The Fighting Temeraire_ ; on the opposite side is not the address the card should be sent to, but of Q’s favourite restaurant.

Q’s been waiting for this one – he’s received dozens of postcards purchased from the National Gallery by now, of Renaissance and Impressionist paintings, vintage prints, and portraits of the royal family. He should have guessed that James would pick  _The Fighting Temeraire_  for this occasion – James is a strategist and pays plenty of attention to detail, but he’s also quite a romantic at heart.  

Q smiles and pins the postcard to his workstation before he shrugs on his coat, checking the time on his phone. It wouldn’t do to be late to their anniversary dinner.


End file.
